International Holocaust Remembrance Day should serve as a reminder that, unless we maintain our alertness and prevent the spread of anti-Israel libel couched in Holocaust terms, the same threat that consumed our forebears in Europe could consume us in our homeland in the deadly realization of delegitimization.

Holocaust remembrance should honor the victims but recently its use has been
perverted by the enemies of the Jews and the Jewish state and, in its perverted
form, is being used as a club to demonize and delegitimize Israel, the Jewish
state.

When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, rushed to
pledge his allegiance to Adolf Hitler he did so out of an anti-Semitic desire to
destroy the Palestinian Jews and replace them with an Arab
nation.

Palestine was a barren Ottoman backwater that was revived by the
Zionist enterprise of creating the legitimate national home of the Jewish people
as unanimously and legally decreed by the world at the League of Nations in
1922. Fast forward to today and the numerous statements of Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas that reek of anti-Semitism.

Abbas received a
doctorate from the Moscow Oriental College in Holocaust denial based on a
confused theory that the Zionists (Jews) cooperated with the Nazis in the murder
of Jews. In 1983, he wrote the book The Secret Relationship between Nazism and
the Zionist Movement, in which he claimed that the Nazi gas chambers were never
used to kill Jews, but only to disinfect them. He reduced the number of Jews
killed in the Holocaust to 890,000 and further theorized that they were murdered
in a joint effort between Jewish leaders and the Nazis.

In his
deteriorating anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, Mahmoud Abbas writes that Adolf
Hitler only decided to kill Jews after David Ben-Gurion provoked him into doing
it by “declaring war on the Nazis” in 1942.

It is interesting to note
that the BBC news profile of Abbas covers up his Holocaust denial. It describes
him as “A highly intelligent man who studied law in Egypt before doing a PhD in
Moscow. He is the author of several books....” The profile fails to describe the
thesis of his PhD or the subjects of his books.

The New York Times calls
Abbas “a lawyer and historian. He holds a doctorate in history from Moscow
Oriental College. His topic was Zionism.” “Zionism” and not “Holocaust
Denial.”

The blatantly anti-Semitic Mahmoud Abbas is called a “moderate.”
This despite the fact that he has repeatedly said that he will never recognize
the Jewish state, “not in a thousand years.” He has also called for a
Palestinian state in which not one Jew will be allowed citizenship, which would
thereby make a Palestinian state the first official “Judenrein” state since Nazi
Germany.

The Jerusalem Post published a report by Khaled Abu Toameh and
Herb Keinon on January 22 quoting Mahmoud Abbas in an interview with
Al-Mayadeen, a Lebanese TV station affiliated with Hezbollah and Iran, as saying
that the Zionist movement had links with the Nazis before the Second World
War.

Abbas claims to have “70 more books I still haven’t published” on
the supposed links between the Zionist movement and the Nazis. “I challenge
anyone to deny the relationship between Zionism and Nazism” said Israel’s
“moderate peace partner.”

Is it any wonder that proponents of the
Palestinian cause lapse into using Holocaust imagery to slander Israel and to
create an obscene metaphor that positions Israel as Nazis and Palestinians as
Holocaust Jews? The statement, on January 24, 2013, from British Liberal
Democrat MP David Ward, that “Jews, who suffered levels of persecution during
the Holocaust, within a few years of liberation from the death camps are
inflicting atrocities on Palestinians on a daily basis in the West Bank and
Gaza,” is replete with anti-Semitic accusations. There you have it: Jews left
concentration camps and almost immediately began beating up, starving, and
executing Palestinian Arabs, according to Ward’s fantasy.

Neither did
Ward back off too much when confronted with outrage from his political party. In
a lame defense he said, “Well, I’m accusing Jews who did it. If you’re a Jew who
didn’t do it then I’m not accusing you.”

Notice his constant reference to
Jews, not Israelis. This is the certain sign of an anti- Semite.

What I
found disturbing about this incident is that those who condemned Ward for his
juxtaposition of Jews and the Holocaust and the Palestinian problem did nothing
to show that neither Jews, nor Israel, were treating Palestinians, in any way,
shape or form, as the Jews has been treated by the Nazis.

Nobody showed
him that, had the Palestinians not been so steeped in their anti- Semitic
rejectionism of living alongside a Jewish state and passionately avowed to
remove the Jewish state from their midst, they would have achieved their state
by now.

THE INFLUENCE of the Holocaust on the Arab-Israel conflict
positions Israel as the evil Nazis even as the Islamists and Palestinian Arabs
apply Nazi doctrine and threats against Israel. Listen to Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and read the Hamas and PLO charters to understand this
truth.

Goebbels-type demonization and imagery are frequently used by
pro-Palestinian, anti- Israel groups as throwaway slogans that reveal the
anti-Semitic roots of their cause.

Greta Berlin, the founder of the “Free
Gaza Movement,” is an anti-Semite, and has often used Holocaust parallels in her
efforts to cloak Israel in Nazi clothes.

On her Free Gaza Facebook page a
video appeared headed with the message that “Zionists operated the concentration
camps and helped murder millions of Jews.” Under this video appeared the
following message, “The word ‘Nazi’ is a combination between National Socialist
Party and the Zionist Party.”

When pressed by other pro-Palestinian
organizations, that were embarrassed by this open display of anti-Semitism, she
made a lame excuse about a “technical error” and claimed those who criticized
her were “on a witch hunt.”

On a pro-Palestinian “Our Land” Facebook
page, Greta Berlin posted a personalized introduction about Zionist-Nazi
collaboration that read: “Finally people are coming to confirm what many of us
have known for many years. Not just that The H [Holocaust] was exploited by the
Zionists to create Israel, but that – in large measure – it was aided, abetted
and to a large degree created by them to create an ineluctable tide of world
opinion for the establishment of a Jewish ‘safe haven.’” Let me repeat that. In
her own words, she wrote that “many of us have known for many years... that the
Holocaust was exploited by Zionists [Jews] to create Israel.” With this, she not
only implicated herself as a rabid anti-Semite, but eerily echoed the thoughts
and words of Mahmoud Abbas, often portrayed as Israel’s reasonable and moderate
peace partner.

When questioned by me on a recent online televised debate,
Greta Berlin, together with an Arab named Rami from Lod and Mahmoud from Amman,
Jordan, all admitted that their individual solutions to the problem were the
same: a Palestinian state in place of Israel. Deep in the heart of those who use
Holocaust metaphors is the ambition to do away with Israel; the Final Solution
to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East.

Based on their recent history,
statements and actions, I suggest Israel’s enemies look in the mirror and see
who are today’s Jew-haters, and who are behaving like modern-day
Nazis.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day should serve as a reminder
that, unless we maintain our alertness and prevent the spread of anti-Israel
libel couched in Holocaust terms, the same threat that consumed our forebears in
Europe could consume us in our homeland in the deadly realization of
delegitimization.

The writer is the author of the book Israel Reclaiming
the Narrative. He is also the special consultant on delegitimization issues to
the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue at the Netanya Academic
College.